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In our efforts to be cutting edge, we (front end developers) have made one of the biggest revolutions in human history, the mobile revolution, based on the concept of information being free, open, and democratic into something else: undemocratic, siloed, and tribal.

Basically, it’s a conversion that I had with a CEO of a company. Anyways, during the course of the conversation, he brings out this remark:

“Your job is to code, just like the designer’s job is to design.”

That comment bothered me. It wasn’t a comment bore of malice or ignorance. It had some truth to it. But it missed an important point. It was the equivalent of saying “My job is to write HTML.”

Now, there’s nothing bad; that is part of my job. But only a part.

No, my annoyance is this:

If my job was just coding, then I’m not doing a good enough job.

OK. Let me explain.

Coding is (relatively) easy. Businesses can pick and choose what company or freelancers to do the work. For a cheap price, the work can be farmed out to anyone of the many off-shore companies at will.

Altogether, that the big talent pool of coding talent.

You, (client/CEO) have to go through this massive pool to find the right person. But that is not what you are looking for. The truth is that you are not looking for someone to code.

You need someone to solve your problem.

As for coding? It’s a means to an end. Employers don’t hire people who code; they hire people who can solve their problems. (And also it’s the same thing that will keep them around…)

Now, I wish he was around when I said this. I have no doubt that both of us would be agreement.

There was another thing that he said, in jest, but in hindsight just as important. Basically, people like myself like the “shiny, new projects”. And yes, I admit, they are the nice ones to work on.

But. There is a group of problems, the “old – fixed it just for now” problems that really need attention. The ones that are begging for someone to just look at and say “you know, if you give me some time, I think I could make this better.”

There are lots of those problems that need serious attention, not the million dollar, new app of the month ones.

…a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms for into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.